Deck of Haunts - Dev Blog #3 - The Audio by Willem Verheughe
Hello there! I am Willem, a 3D Artist for Deck of Haunts, but alongside that, with our limited capacity, I have had the opportunity to delve deeper and work on something that has interested me for a while, Sound Design.
It was a challenge but also a fun experience to learn while working on the Sound Effects in Deck of Haunts, so let's take a deeper dive into the process of making these creepy and twisted sounds you will hear in our Haunted Mansion.
The process
Starting off with no experience, I relied heavily on library sound effects. I slowly started building a library from free sfx (Sound Effects) I gathered online which I usually mixed together with some instrument plugins in Reaper and added sound effects on top of, such as equalizers, delays, reverbs, and so on.
However, relying only on library sfx has its limitations. As the experience grew, so did my confidence in recording my own sounds.
I started using props such as deck cards to create the sfx for the hover, selecting, and playing of the cards in game. I even started using my own voice. At the beginning it was a real challenge to not cringe when I started doing this, but using your own voice gives you more freedom.
I used it to add some grunting noises to the human when they die, take damage, or when you turn them completely insane.
However, my favorite recordings are the whispers of the house when playing your cards to torture or scare the humans inside. These whispers need to feel mysterious, spooky and scary. To achieve this, I recorded myself whispering some sentences in Latin or some gibberish. Usually I would record the same sentence a few times with different tone, speed, and loudness and throw these together in Reaper. There I overlap them, reverse some, and to make them all sound a bit more spooky, I add some pitch variation, some reverb, and delays on them. It's a fun process when you get the hang of it.
Preventing chaos
Working on the sound effects from a top down perspective, with an overview of the entire playing field, was quite the challenge. We have the awesome music tracks created by Aleks, the atmospheric background loops both indoors and outdoors, you have all the different rooms, the humans, and on top of that, you're playing cards, these also cast effects and VFX and so on... There is a lot going on, and that requires some balancing to prevent chaos.
The main mechanics that helped me to create this hierarchy of sounds are the zoom and hover mechanic. The zoom is used to distinguish most of the ambient sounds inside of the house from the ambient sounds outside of the house. There are however too many rooms inside the house to play all of them at once, so for this we used the hover mechanic. Each special room has their own unique ambient loop in order to strengthen their identity that can be heard when you hover over these rooms
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Back to work!
Now it’s time for me to return to the microphone and get creative with some newspapers and magazines, making some sounds for a fun new feature we’re introducing. This will add to the story surrounding the arrival of several bosses in the game.
I hope you will enjoy my whispers in your ears while playing Deck of Haunts! I for sure look forward to see the game out there for you all to play.
If you want to stay in the loop with the most recent updates, or talk to me or one of the fellow developers, come join our discord server:
https://discord.gg/s4Qu6pg7D7
Thank you for reading and until next time!
It was a challenge but also a fun experience to learn while working on the Sound Effects in Deck of Haunts, so let's take a deeper dive into the process of making these creepy and twisted sounds you will hear in our Haunted Mansion.
The process
Starting off with no experience, I relied heavily on library sound effects. I slowly started building a library from free sfx (Sound Effects) I gathered online which I usually mixed together with some instrument plugins in Reaper and added sound effects on top of, such as equalizers, delays, reverbs, and so on.
However, relying only on library sfx has its limitations. As the experience grew, so did my confidence in recording my own sounds.
I started using props such as deck cards to create the sfx for the hover, selecting, and playing of the cards in game. I even started using my own voice. At the beginning it was a real challenge to not cringe when I started doing this, but using your own voice gives you more freedom.
I used it to add some grunting noises to the human when they die, take damage, or when you turn them completely insane.
However, my favorite recordings are the whispers of the house when playing your cards to torture or scare the humans inside. These whispers need to feel mysterious, spooky and scary. To achieve this, I recorded myself whispering some sentences in Latin or some gibberish. Usually I would record the same sentence a few times with different tone, speed, and loudness and throw these together in Reaper. There I overlap them, reverse some, and to make them all sound a bit more spooky, I add some pitch variation, some reverb, and delays on them. It's a fun process when you get the hang of it.
Preventing chaos
Working on the sound effects from a top down perspective, with an overview of the entire playing field, was quite the challenge. We have the awesome music tracks created by Aleks, the atmospheric background loops both indoors and outdoors, you have all the different rooms, the humans, and on top of that, you're playing cards, these also cast effects and VFX and so on... There is a lot going on, and that requires some balancing to prevent chaos.
The main mechanics that helped me to create this hierarchy of sounds are the zoom and hover mechanic. The zoom is used to distinguish most of the ambient sounds inside of the house from the ambient sounds outside of the house. There are however too many rooms inside the house to play all of them at once, so for this we used the hover mechanic. Each special room has their own unique ambient loop in order to strengthen their identity that can be heard when you hover over these rooms
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Back to work!
Now it’s time for me to return to the microphone and get creative with some newspapers and magazines, making some sounds for a fun new feature we’re introducing. This will add to the story surrounding the arrival of several bosses in the game.
I hope you will enjoy my whispers in your ears while playing Deck of Haunts! I for sure look forward to see the game out there for you all to play.
If you want to stay in the loop with the most recent updates, or talk to me or one of the fellow developers, come join our discord server:
https://discord.gg/s4Qu6pg7D7
Thank you for reading and until next time!